Plastic surgeons need to define an Internet marketing and SEO strategy that will determine their success in the digital marketing age. While still relevant in certain contexts, traditional marketing is often expensive and hard to measure, making the Internet the most viable avenue to earn new patients.

To define the essential marketing principles for successful practice, here are five vital strategies for plastic surgeon Internet marketing and SEO.

1. Cultivate a Web Presence

Every plastic surgeon that hopes to run their business for the long term must cultivate a web presence. A website is the first step towards that goal as it creates a platform upon which potential patients can learn more about your business without physically visiting the practice.

It is important to invest in a good web designer who will be able to create a responsive (mobile-friendly) website that best represents your practice. This will help to give your brand a much needed online presence that will grant better tidings for you amidst cutthroat competition.

2. Claim & Verify a Google+ Page

A Google+ page is essential to a plastic surgeons’ SEO efforts in a number of ways. Once verified it allows a plastic surgeon to place a variety of content-informative and promotional-in a way that will lead to higher search engine rankings.

3. Request Positive Reviews from Happy Patients

Prospective patients will always look forward to hearing what other people have to say about your private practice. They trust the opinion of other patients more than any promotion material and it is up to you to solicit positive reviews from those you have served before.

Pleased patients will not hesitate to put in a good word for you at your request. These reviews should be posted on your website and social media pages to create a good impression about you. Positive reviews will help you garner new patients and increased profits in the long run.

4. Produce Content Consistently

With your website and Google+ pages up and running, what is left is for you to create content. Articles and videos are a good way to share your credibility and experience on social media and website platforms, and it also services as one of the most effective plastic surgeon SEO strategies. While some surgeons are able to produce this content themselves, many busy plastic surgeons outsource their content development.

While they are few and far between, some plastic surgeon SEO companies for content creation and marketing services for their clients. Optimized Surgeons is one of these practice who provides professional content generation for plastic surgery SEO clients. A good set of articles and informative videos consistently added to relevant pages will establish trust and credibility in your practice, with the intention that web traffic can convert into profitable interactions.

5. Share Relevant & Useful Content

As a plastic surgeon your target audience are not the same as those of a regular surgeon. It will not be as effective to engage your patients if you cloud your social media sites with information about general surgery and other broad subject matter.

Instead think about the specific needs of your target market, and develop and share content parallel with these needs. It might not be easy to develop content but that is where you can invest in professional service providers and work with them to generate accurate content for SEO purposes.

The Internet marketing strategies and tools that you choose could mean the difference in success of failure of your practice. A plastic surgeon needs to up their game if they wish to beat the competition at Internet marketing and SEO in order to gain customer loyalty that is not easily dented.

Search marketer and SEO professionals leverage a wide range of tools and services to bring value and intelligence to the services they provide clients. However, may search marketing providers remain stuck on which tools and services are essential, and which are redundant. Below are three SEO tools and subscription services that will maximize your capabilities and value as a search marketing provider.

1. Blacklink Analysis Tools

Blacklink analysis tools are important and very powerful to assess a site’s backlink profile for SEO. They allow you to analyze the incoming links from a specific page, assess the link quality, study the link building strategy of your competitors, and improve your rankings.

You can use blacklink analysis tools to scan the links from a particular page and get the important statistics in the graphs and pie charts. The report will offer useful information involving:

In order to help you evaluate your current link building strategy and discover which keywords you are more likely to achieve high rankings, a complete anchor text analysis is performed on the the links. This is also essential ensure proper SEO link building techniques and avoiding over-optimization penalties. These tools provide a complete analysis of blacklinks including the anchor text of the links, the No-Follow status, and the OBL number of each link.

2. Yext

Yext is a provider of a feature-rich Digital Location Management solution that helps you leverage location-based technologies to direct foot traffic into your local stores. Yext provides an integrated GeoMarketing program cloud that allows marketers to manage the local content, store pages, listings, analytics, and campaigns. The main features of this location management platform include Power listings, Pages, and Xone.

Power Listing: Yext cooperates with the most established and well-known search engines, directories, maps, and apps across the globe allowing you to leverage direct connections to publishers in Global Listing Network to get found.

Pages: You can create and manage pages for your every location on your own website and mobile applications at scale. Pages from Yext are designed according to SEO and for worldwide content delivery with reliable performance to increase your search engine visibility on the web.

Xone: this feature enables you to put information about your stores at the fingertips of your mobile visitors. You can manage all your Xones and the beacons that power them from a central place: Xone Manager.

The best thing about Yext for SEO is that it cleans-up a business’ information (citations) across over 55 well-known directories and social sites. This is critical for Google local 3-pack SEO and ensuring top placement in these prized search results. Visit Yext.com to learn more about this valuable SEO service.

3. Rank Reporting

Rank reporting tools allow you to track search rankings easily over time for a greater insight into how your SEO efforts affect your keyword position across major search engine. The features of these tools include:

Web ranking overview

Safe queries

Competitor identification and tracking

Flexible Report view

Scheduled reporting

International Search Engine Rankings

Some of the best rank reporting software includes: Rank Tracker (part of SEO Powersuite) and Moz, which also offers a number of other solid SEO tools.

Search Engine Optimization is a method of setting up one’s online presence (website, blog, videos) to be best and most readily noticed and ranked by search engines such as Yahoo, Bing, and Google. In this article, the focus will be on search engine optimization (SEO) for surgeons trying to improve their search engine ranking in regard to their local area.

When you look up local businesses on Google, the results will display as what is now being called the Google local 3 pack. Basically, this is three elements of information about your practice that Google has chosen to display to its users. The main points of the information are location, website, and reviews. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to local SEO for surgeons.

A Primer on Local SEO for Surgeons

One of the things that it is important to note regarding the local SEO for surgeons is that local SEO is dependent upon the geographical location of the person making the search. If your practice is not the closest one geographically to the searcher, it will not be the first one to show up in his or her results list. However, the user does have the capability to expand their search. So it is important that you follow the steps below in order to improve your local SEO and claim your place in the rankings alongside (or hopefully ahead) of your local competitors.

Claim & Verify Your Google+ Page

Google’s local search algorithm is influenced by Google+ Local, formerly Google Places. Because of this, Google gives some weight to local businesses and surgical practice’s Google+ pages.

In order to get a Google+ business page you have to sign up for a Google profile. Once you have done that, you can click on the left-hand menu and find “pages”. From there, it is relatively self-explanatory to put together the page featuring your practice. After you have gotten this accomplished, you need to verify your page with Google. This entails the following steps:

Get Listed on Major Surgical Directories & Websites

This can be accomplished by searching for and going through the listing process for the individual websites that relate to the specialty of your practice. Taking the time to do this will build credibility for your local surgeon SEO strategy through links and citations

Optimize Your Website

Website optimization is a big job and is best left to someone or a company that specializes in this technical SEO component. However, it is an important part of getting your surgical practice noticed on local SEO, so it needs to be done. Website optimization has to do with the placement and frequency of your keywords along with tweaking the site for technical fluidity (for better crawling and indexing). We suggest a specialized company that offers local SEO for surgeons, OptimizedSurgeons.com.

Audit & Optimize Your Citation Profile

A citation represents the Name, Address, and Phone number information regarding your practice. It is important that you audit your citations (see what information is out there) and make sure it is all the same on various directories, social media sites, and other web properties. This is especially important to rank in Google’s local 3-pack. Tools like Yext.com will help you with this.

Create a Content Strategy

By publishing blog posts, videos, and the like on your site (and on key, optimized money pages), you can create greater “credibility” in your business, in addition to keep fresh content populating your web presence. Google’s search engine algorithm is geared to crawl and index sites that continue to offer fresh content. As a result, creating and employing a content strategy can not only help with our surgeon SEO strategy, but also increase the credibility, validity, and professionalism of your surgical practice.

An SEO audit is an effective and revealing way to analyze a site’s potential, areas of weakness, and areas for improvement to achieve specific SEO goals and keyword rankings. For ecommerce sites, SEO audits are vital before embarking upon any SEO service program.

But before investing in or undertaking an SEO audit, what has to be asked? What areas should be focused on? What areas require the most improvement? These are a few questions to consider when performing an ecommerce SEO site audit to ensure you get the most out of it, and to ensure the areas which need improvement are reviewed upon.

1. Low CTR or High Bounce Rate?

Reviewing top ranked pages to determine issues and performance lapses will help eliminate the potential of SEO lapses. A low click through rate (CTR) is a common problem sites have if pages aren’t properly optimized or meta-descriptions aren’t on point. These are foundational aspects of doing SEO audits for ecommerce websites as they reveal essential yet basic information that must be address for proper SEO to be established.

If there are content issues or speed problems, bounce rates also occur. Using Google Analytics allows you to:

Find average positions and CTR queries, as well as determine bounce rates.

You can also review titles, meta descriptions, load speeds, and other areas of concern on your site.

Exporting this information to an Excel spreadsheet then allows you to determine areas of concern, changes to be made, and issues which are causing site rate to drop.

2. Speed & Performance Issues

You have to review all pages on your site to determine speed issues. Site speed reports are available with Google analytics which will provide speed suggestions and insights, so you can improve upon speed and load rates. Yandex also offers load rate times, HTML load page, and other speed information pertaining to your site. You can further delve into mobile and desktop sites, to find out what issues might be causing slow load rates, in turn causing SEO issues.

3. High Traffic Queries?

If competitors are ranking in high traffic queries and your site isn’t, audit will tell you why. A competitive analysis will also look at high traffic trends in other countries, including the Netherlands, Spain, and other regions of the world. Analysis can also find missing opportunities your site isn’t cashing in on, you can in turn compare this information with that of competitors, to find out which changes to make.

4. Missing Internal Links or Only XML Sitemap

When the most important pages of your site aren’t being prioritized this will hurt your rank. These “orphan” pages aren’t properly linked, so can’t be viewed by visitors. SEO crawlers allow you to integrate XML sitemaps to inform you which pages can’t be found. From there you can properly integrate them.

5. More Search Visibility

Checking if you are ranking with the right format and pages is also an area audit will delve into. This allows you to identify potential missed opportunities, and pursue missed image and content being added to your site. From there you can prioritize development and changes to be made; there are even tools allowing you to view competitor pages, and their universal search visibility profiles.

SEO audits are a great way to determine what you are missing, what areas of concern are hurting rank, and which areas of your site should be modified. If you aren’t doing as well as you would hope through search engines, consider an SEO audit which will provide you with critical information, to help increase site rank. For more information on ecommerce-specific SEO site audits, visit ClickCentricSEO.com to learn more.